As Heard on The Stephanie Miller Show

Friday, September 28, 2007

These days, when we say nuke, we're probably talking about zapping a couple of hot dogs in the 'ol microwave.

But in the 50's and 60's, "nuke" had a more ominous meaning. For we had seen what the only two A-bombs ever dropped in war did to two major Japanese cities. We say the skin blown off bodies. We saw the festering cancers. And we new that the only thing that seperated mankind from a most terrible coda was one guy in Washington or Moscow having a real bad day.We thought it was all over in the 80's. After all there was glasnost and the fall of the wall and Putin and the people standing in front of the Russian army.

We thought the nightmare was over.

Could have fooled us.

Quietly, persistantly, under cover of bin Ladin, the Eagle and the Bear have resumed in earnest thier favorite pastime....finding new and more effecient way of blowing away the other's collective ass.

That's assuming they never stopped.

Two stories slipped under the radar. They both come from the Russian news agancy Novasti.One, I have to thank Drudgie for. It mentioned that the Russians vow to retaliate if weapons were deployed in space (http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070927/81302492.html). But through a link in that story, I read something ever more ominous: Russia and the USA have been developing new bombs under our noses! Russia has been playing with a new vacuum bomb, while the US has been countering with an even more destructive 14-ton super bomb (http://www.en.rian.ru/world/20070913/78518873.html).

This serves as a stark reminder that, while we have been fretting about rank ameteurs piddling around with dirty bombs in Skyway luggage (pull, not carry your destruction!), the professionals who invented the WMD in the first place continue to work on new models that would make the former look like a wet firecracker.

When I was young, during the Cuban crisis, I remember listening to my local Lawton, OK radio station, KSWO, and hearing the top of theo hour newscasts from ABC. I knew that nearby Ft. Sill, a major military training bases now and then, would be a target, and at the tender age of 8, I worried if I was falling asleep for the last time.

It was a nightmare then, something no 8 year old should dream about.

The problem is that, the Mutual Assured Destruction game we were playing depended on onr fragile assumption......both sides had leaders who were sane. We do not have that assurance today.

And so the nightmare continues. Thousands of missles pointed at the US and Russia, poised to be fired at anytime. And while we worry about a dapper madman with an impossible-to-pronounce name and, seemingly, Ann Coulter as a speechwriter, maybe we should worry that our exisitance may stand on the shaky ground on which our "leader" from Texas may have one bad day.

..> Kate McCann has been warned she could be charged with the"accidental" killing of her daughter Madeleine after Portuguese police directlyasked her whether she was behind the toddler's disappearance.

In anextraordinary twist, Mrs McCann's family said detectives now believed she causedthe four-year-old's death in their holiday apartment, then hid the body beforereturning a month later to dispose of it.

For the last year and a half, it seemed, I have been faced with a world-wide plea to find missing Maddy McCann. That blond hair, wide smile, and sweet face becoming the theme for many a MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and Yahoo 360 page. A channel on YouTube was created to find her. Laura Bush and David & Victoria Beckham have joined in the plea. Millions of people around the world have fallen in love with this little moppet and thier clean-cut parents.

I could have saved them the trouble.

Remember Susan Smith? Or the lady in Texas who drowned her kids because she thought Jesus told her to do it? How about Paula Sims, who reported one daughter missing in 1986 and another missing three years later? Or Diane Downs, who claimed that a stranger waved her car down on a deserted road, then killed her daughter?

And it goes on and on and on. We have gone through this all before. Clean-cut young mothers and dads, the Perfect Parents from Red hetrosexual America, wind up killing thier kids, dumping them, then finding a way to go on the Todaygoodmorningamericaearly Shows, weeping in front of sympathetic hostesses, pleading with the "guilty parties" to bring thier little baby home.

Right.

Having almost become one of those darling little kids achiveing room temperature the hard way myself, my level of skepticism rises every time something like this happens. Yes, I really do want to believe that this time, the parents really are sincere, really are the victims in all this, and that the perp in question truly is some broken-nosed Tom Sizemore clone with a deeze-dems-dose vocabulary.

And what pains is seeing people fall for it over and over and over again. To say something would be like blasphemy. Kinda like saying that OJ didn't do it or something. We truly want this nice people to be the innocent party.

Maybe one day, they will be.

Or worse than that is the scenerio: a family craving money and attention creates a situation in which one member of the family "dissapears," the parents go on the usual talk shows, various book and film deals signed. All created on purpose, either with the "missing" kid in the safe hands of friends, or people who have agreed to take the rap.......or in the worst case, the "missing kid" is dead, but the family cashes in, as that would be the motive.

Yes, that scenario is as sick as you can get. But how do we know if it has not happened before. Maybe even in this case?

We don't, and we must keep in mind that (A) Mrs. McCann is only a suspect and (B) little Maddie is still missing.

And (C) this will happen again. And (D) we will fall for it......again.